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Easy passwords

Wed 26 Nov 2003, 02:25 PM

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by Ben Langhinrichs
I was changing my password on an on-line brokerage account, and encountered the following hint:

Hint: Pick a Password you will easily remember. We recommend entering your Password in all lower case letters.

Note, this is not a free subscription to on on-line magazine or something.  This is a brokerage account with lots of access rights, where the systems people have chosen a system that uses case sensitive passwords for a good reason - because they are more secure, and any password that is really easy to remember is probably really easy to guess.  As my friend Rich Schwartz would probably point out, it is easier to break a password with social engineering than with software engineering.  

I guess it could have been worse.  They could have added "Remember to write down your user name and password and keep them together in your wallet.", but maybe that is just assumed.

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